Director: Denis Villeneuve
Year Released: 2015
Rating: 3.5
An upstanding FBI agent (Emily Blunt), along with her loyal partner (Daniel Kaluuya), get assigned to a mission with two men from "the State Department" (Josh Brolin and Benicio Del Toro) to fight the drug trade along the U.S.-Mexico border ... except the nature of the assignment is not as clear-cut as she originally believes. Villeneuve called it a "dark poem," which I'll go along with - it's certainly an analysis of morality and ethics and what happens in a situation where few people are ethical or moral (the "wolves" have taken over) and fighting for one's ingrained sense of justice might turn out to be a lost cause. Any argument that it's Pro-Agency and defends the actions of Team Brolin is missing the point: there's a reason Blunt is the center of the movie (she's an upstanding figure, set to right the wrongs) and, of course, consistently used (by her own organization, by Brolin to "legitimize" his crew's actions) and mistreated in the process - until we find a way (as Brolin says) to stop people from abusing drugs, this is a never-ending issue. It's chilling and unnerving, with a trio of exceptional performances (Del Toro is an Angel of Death; Brolin's character lost his moral compass in the desert and never bothered to look for it again). What is an innocent to do in the face of so many devils? Sometimes, it's to simply surrender.
